The garden at Villa Aurelia on the Janiculum, before anybody was in it
Rome

A city that
keeps its
gardens
behind walls.

Rome is the hardest of the four regions on this site to photograph well, and it is worth saying so. The light everybody comes for is on the streets, and the venues are behind walls. A Roman wedding that works is one where somebody has planned for both halves of that.

Rome, in the heat
The hedge avenue at Villa Aurelia

Twenty minutes
outside the
gate

Almost every Roman venue is an enclosure: a garden on the Janiculum behind a wall, a hotel courtyard off Piazza del Popolo, a cloister. Inside, they are quiet, green and beautifully lit. Outside, thirty seconds away, is Rome.

The frames people keep from a Roman wedding are almost always the twenty minutes spent on the wrong side of that wall — the steps, the street in the heat, the walk back in. It costs nothing except being told in advance that it is worth planning, which is the only reason this page exists.

Selected work

A courtyard,
and a city
outside it

Piazza del Popolo · Rome

Piazza del Popolo · Rome
Where the work is Rome

The Janiculum and the centre

Villas with a garden and the whole city underneath them, and hotels with a courtyard you would not guess from the street.

Villa Aurelia Hotel de Russie

Umbria and the hill country

An hour and a half north-east and the traffic stops: castles above Trasimeno, stone houses in the Umbrian valleys.

Villa Baroncino Castello Il Borgia Castello di Santa Tecla

Every Italian commission

Practical Before you fix a date
Best months
May, June, September and October. Rome in July and August is hot in a way the hills are not, and a ceremony before six is felt by everybody in a jacket.
The light
The city is tall and narrow, so the useful hour arrives sooner than the sunset time suggests: the sun goes behind a roofline long before it goes behind the horizon.
Getting about
Nothing in the centre is far and everything takes longer than the map says. Build the transfers on how the traffic actually moves, not on the distance, and keep the party on foot wherever the walk is under ten minutes — it will be quicker and it will photograph.
Out of the city
Umbria starts about ninety minutes north-east, and a wedding out there is a different proposition entirely: space, quiet, and a landscape that does half the work.

Getting married
in Rome?

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